Boston Catholics
O'Connor, Thomas H.
MACKEREL SNAPPERS Boston Catholics A History of the Church and Its People Thomas H. O'Connor Nortlieiisturn Unhvtvity /Vis.i. $28.95.357 pp. Anthony D. Andreassi G rowing up Jewish in Boston...
...That had not always been the case...
...By 1960 there were more than 5,500 nuns in the archdiocese and 400-plus young men enrolled in the diocesan seminaries...
...By the first half of the twentieth century the Catholic church in Boston occupied a position of power that could both inspire and repel...
...Described by one historian as sometimes more Roman than Catholic and more Catholic than Christian, O'Connell ruled his archdiocese with an iron fist, demanding absolute obedience from both clergy and laity...
...Like New York's Cardinal Francis Spellman (another Bostonian), Cushing died just as the full effect of the changes of Vatican II and the Vietnam War were being felt in parishes throughout the archdiocese...
...When Richard Cushing was named archbishop in 1945, he inherited an institutional church supported by a thick Catholic culture...
...It was not until 1788 that Mass could be celebrated publicly in Boston, and, as late as 1790, the Catholic population numbered fewer than five hundred, with one priest to serve them...
...Despite O'Connor's even-handedness, one might wonder if he should have ended his book with the death of Medeiros...
...At his death in 1907, the Archdiocese of Boston (it was made a metropolitan see in 1875) had a Catholic population of more than 850,000 with upwards of 200 parishes, 600 priests, and 1,600 women religious...
...In 1937 O'Connell breached the inner sanctum of Yankee society when he presided at the first Mass ever celebrated in Harvard Stadium...
...The first non-Irishman appointed to Boston in over a century, Medeiros born in the Portuguese Azores in 1915, had come to the United States in 1931 when his family settled in Fall River...
...By mid-century the Catholic church in Boston had reached full stature and no longer had to defer to the once-dominant Protestant ruling class...
...Before the Revolutionary War, few Catholics lived in New England, where Puritan loathing of papists ran deep...
...In terms of statistics, the Boston Catholic church saw its golden age in the postwar era, as did the rest of U.S...
...In discussing Cardinal Bernard Law, the author honestly and accurately points out the strong conservatism of the present archbishop and offers a hesitant and measured evaluation of his leadership...
...In 1768, in the approach to hostilities with Great Britain, Samuel Adams commented that American colonists had more to fear from "the growth of popery" than from the Stamp Act...
...Still, O'Connor is a yarn spinner as well as an accomplished historian...
...The middle decades of the century witnessed an especially virulent wave of nativist prejudice, and Boston is remembered for the infamous burning in 1844 of the Ursuline convent in Charlestown by a Protestant mob— while local firemen stood by doing nothing...
...However, it was not always smooth sailing for "Gangplank Bill...
...This growth continued under William Henry O'Con-nell, Boston's first cardinal, who literally "reigned" in Boston from 1907 until his death in 1944...
...In that year, Cushing was devastated when a hundred of his own seminarians picketed a talk he was delivering to protest the rules at Saint John's Seminary in Brighton...
...Everywhere in the U.S...
...In Boston Boy, Hentoff described how he and his friends were threatened and beaten up on several occasions by young Irish Catholic toughs, simply for being Jews...
...O'Connell earned that sobriquet thanks to the regular newspaper pictures of him as he departed on his many cruises...
...Since the general public knew nothing of the scandal, Rome declined to act, but it was the end of O'Connell's ambition to succeed Baltimore Cardinal James Gibbons as the leader of the American hierarchy...
...For the most part, historians do best when they stick to the past...
...Through no fault of his own, Medeiros will forever be associated with the Boston archdiocese during some of its most troubled years...
...In Boston Catholics, Thomas O'Connor, professor emeritus of history at Boston College, traces the transformation of that group from a small, persecuted minority to the city's dominant religious bloc...
...In 1920 the ecclesiastical authorities discovered that O'Connell's priest-nephew, whom he had appointed chancellor of the Commonweal H December 17,1999 archdiocese, was secretly married to a woman in New York City whom he visited every week...
...In a city where referees sometimes halted basketball games on Sunday afternoon so that everyone could listen to the anti-Semitic radio tirades of Father Charles E. Cough-lin, Jews like Hentoff looked with fear and contempt on the Catholic church, and even had a custom of spitting at churches when driving by (as long as no one was looking...
...By 1966 astute observers realized that the halcyon days were over...
...All the New England bishops (with one exception) asked Rome to remove O'Connell from office...
...Though the number of priests was still increasing, it was not growing at nearly the same rate as the general Catholic population...
...When Medeiros was named archbishop of Boston in 1970, he shepherded the archdiocese with quiet, gentle leadership in a tumultuous period marked by both radical experimentation and great uncertainty...
...He tells the tale of Boston's Catholics with grace, charm, and deep affection...
...Between 1945 and 1960 the Catholic population grew by at least a quarter of a million in each five-year period...
...This was matched by increases in vocations to the priesthood and religious life...
...After all of his predecessors had presided over the institutional expansion of the church, Medeiros witnessed its contraction...
...Nevertheless, O'Connell's influence remained strong on his home turf...
...With the rapid growth of the Catholic population in the first decades of the nineteenth century (thanks to large-scale Irish immigration), anti-Catholic sentiment increased...
...Just as it did in other large urban dioceses, the church in Boston grew exponentially between the Civil War and World War II...
...Since O'Connor courageously takes his study up to the present, he attempts the tricky task of writing history about the living...
...Commonweal 1 3 December 17,1999...
...However, the subtle winds of change could by felt as early as the 1950s...
...More than a hundred Catholic schools were closed and Sunday Mass attendance fell by 25 percent...
...Catholic church a new style of episcopal leadership was needed, and in Boston that task fell to Cushing's successor, Humberto Medeiros...
...O'Connor has already told this part of the story in Fitzpatrick's Boston, his admirable study of the city's third bishop...
...Though violence like this became less common as the years went on and the Catholic population continued to increase, anti-Catholic prejudice persisted and exhibited itself in more subtle ways...
...Boston's city fathers usually consulted with O'Connell, known as "Number One" by state legislators, on important matters...
...When Bishop John Joseph Williams succeeded Fitzpatrick in 1866, he found a Catholic community of about 300,000 (mostly of Irish descent) and 116 priests to minister to them...
...Catholicism...
...Anthony D. Andreassi, a member of the faculty at Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C., is a graduate student in history at Georgetown University...
...Anthony D. Andreassi G rowing up Jewish in Boston in the 1930s, the journalist Nat Hentoff had an understandably negative view of Catholics...
Vol. 126 • December 1999 • No. 22
